A national-level exhibition featuring flowers, wine and cau doi (parallel sentences), for Vietnamese lunar New Year (Tet) will be held for the first time in Hanoi from February 9-14.

The event is scheduled to kick off at the Vietnam Culture and Art Exhibition Centre, 2 Hoa Lu Street, on Friday morning with performances by eight art troupes.

For the country’s biggest annual festival, flowers and wine are essential in every Vietnamese household.

And for a long time, parallel sentences, pairs of sentences equal in structure which express the author’s opinions or emotions about a phenomenon or social event, have been an interesting cultural feature, though they are less common today.

On display at the flower and pottery section will be a variety of typical flowers and fruits for Tet from all regions like pink peach blossoms from the north, yellow apricot from the south, orchids from the highlands and kumquat.

An area called “Vietnamese country wine, parallel sentences and letters” will help visitors discover the traditional method of making wine in rural villages and enjoy some 200 calligraphy works on display.

There will also be an area dubbed Huong ruou Kinh Bac (the fragrance of wine in northern capital), which demonstrates stages of distilling traditional wine by artisans from Dai Lam village in Yen Phong district of the northern Bac Ninh province.

Visitors will have a chance to taste wine and enjoy quan ho (northern folk music originating in Bac Giang province) and a wide selection of rural specialties of the northern provinces.

The highlight of the event will be a festival of traditional liquor made from rice, fruits, tree leaves, corn, and other farm produce.

On display will be ruou can, made by ethnic minorities in the central highlands and north-western regions (Hoa Binh); ruou ngo (corn wine) from Bac Ha town in the northern mountains; Bau Da from the central Binh Dinh province; and Lang Van from the northern Bac Ninh province.

Other specialties include Hong Dao from the central Quang Nam province; Go Den from the Long An province in the Mekong Delta; and Mau Son from the northern mountains.

Wine experts and researchers will be invited to taste the samples and pick the best in terms of quality, colour, and taste.

The organisers will present awards to select grape wine, industrially-distilled wine and wine produced by craft villages.